Refresh hardware support in LTS releases for carefully-selected hardware

Roll up accumulated stable updates into updated images to reduce download requirements for new deployments

Maintain stability of existing installations

Note that, unlike the big releases, we don't push point release images to the CDN, so there's no need to coordinate this with IS.

Between Release minus 6 months and Release minus 2 months:

Discuss candidates for new or improved hardware support with affected parties. Some sources for this work should be:

the Canonical support team (via Steve George)

customers

the Ubuntu kernel team

the Ubuntu QA team

Establish a hit-list of bugs to fix in the point release using a milestone. Milestoning bugs is not a commitment to including the changes in the point release; they may be deferred after further information becomes available.

In concert with affected developers, triage the hit-list for feasibility.

Release minus 2 months:

Process stable release updates as normal. For hardware-enabling fixes, the package should be tested on the affected hardware prior to submitting to sign-off for -proposed.

Discuss the possibility of a Canonical press release for the point release with marketing.

Liaise with IS, QA, community and certification to arrange for testing resources.

Canvas OEM and Support organizations for any bugs important to try to get fixed.

Release minus 1 month:

In coordination with QA, verify that all candidate bugs are fixed.

Upload a new base-files package to -proposed to bump the lsb_release description (example for 8.04.4). Do not change the DISTRIB_RELEASE value, which is used programmatically by third-party software. If the etc/os-release file exists, update VERSION and PRETTY_NAME, don't update VERSION_ID.

If the kernel or associated modules have been changed, upload debian-installer after all the binaries are in place. If the ABI changed, make sure to take account of this throughout debian-installer/build/config/ and in the installer seed for all flavours being built.

Change cdimage/lib/cdimage/config.py and debian-cd/CONF.sh to use the new release version number.

Change the cdimage crontab to build from -proposed temporarily.

Update the manifest to reflect publishing status of images based on input from product leads.

Build CD images (which will be published on cdimage.ubuntu.com) and smoke-test in some convenient environment to check for obvious failures.

Notify translations-team to prepare updates for point release.

Release minus 3 weeks:

Notify Evan Dandrea to update umenu and wubi for the point release.

Include the latest translation updates into the sources for the point release.

Copy .manifest to .manifest.full, and prune all images from previous releases from the .manifest file to allow timely mirror probing.

Run sync-mirrors on nusakan to push out the pre-published file structure.

Release:

Release images as final, and move the previous images to old-releases.ubuntu.com:

Archive the old copy of wubi.exe to old-releases, and publish a new one (do this first so that its timestamp will be newer than that of the checksum files so that the checksums will be updated properly)

Find which previous images on cdimage.ubuntu.com for this release are going to be replaced by this image set, and archive them to old-releases (using a similar procedure to that in EndOfLifeProcess for moving images from cdimage.ubuntu.com to old-images, but leave /srv/cdimage.ubuntu.com/www/full/netboot/RELEASE/ alone).